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Turkish Invasion? Massive influx of non-english traffic

Last month, a client of mine has had a very large increase in irrelevant traffic. This traffic is all being sent by Google from mostly eastern Europe, but also from Egypt and Brazil. The largest influx is from Turkey.

The traffic is all landing on only two URL's. The magnitude of this traffic is about 350 visits per day. The main keywords sending traffic are:

program za skidanje muzike (Bosnian for "program for downloading music")

My client is a small nonprofit summer music festival (with a strong emphasis on Opera music) so some of the on-page at least relates to these keywords. But the site is entirely in English.

Since the words are related to a traditional sketchy vertical I'm worried that my client site has been hacked. Though, for the life of me, I can't imagine what anyone can gain from this.

My questions are:

Does anyone have any idea what is going on?

What are the potential ramifications of this irrelevant traffic? (I'm worried about the traffic slowing down the site, I'm also worried that 350 visits per day and a 95% bounce rate is going to hurt my clients reputation with search engines)

2 Responses

I doubt 350 visits a day would slow down the site unless it is hosted on a shared server with a much-less-than-stellar hosting company. The high bounce rate on a few terms shouldn't affect rankings for the entire site, but would only affect those particular terms. If the bounce rate was that high on the majority of terms I'd be more concerned.

However, I do think you are correct to be suspicious of hacking. Have you tried looking at Google's cache of those pages, viewing the source of the cache, and searching for the phrases you are concerned with? Have you received any messages from Google either in the SERPs or in GWT related to the site being hacked?

I think you are right that the main concern here is security. Great ideas on how to screen for this. There is no hacked message in the SERPs. I don't currently have access to the their GWT but will make it a priority. I did look at the source code in Google's cache and there is no sign of these terms. There is not a single instead of "download" which is a common characteristic to all these queries.

It could be just an algorithmic hiccup. The site does use some fancy characters to describe the Operas that they produce. One example is the "i" with grave accent in the Opera Così Fan Tutte. I suppose it is possible that with enough repetition of these types of characters Google may think the site has some relevant non-english content.

Thanks again for the thoughts. Hope everything is going well at seOverflow.

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